May Day Musings

Last Thursday, May 1, thousands of workers from the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Los Angeles stopped working in protest of the Iraq War. The strike, according to Democracy Now!, was the largest since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

"It’s astonishing and wildly encouraging that a West Coast labor union would show more guts and determination than the U.S. Congress," wrote a Los Angeles writer on the web newsletter CounterPunch, "in publicly defying a Republican administration."

Meanwhile, back in the only state president Bush hasn't visited, the Vermont AFL-CIO issued a statement of support for the striking West Coast workers. And on Saturday, May 3, the Old Labor Hall in Barre filled up a for a lecture by Amy and David Goodman.

Amy is the acclaimed host of labor-friendly Democracy Now! Her brother, a Waterbury resident, is a freelance journalist who's married to Democratic House Rep Sue Minter. Amy and David are now touring the country in support of their third co-written book, Standing Up to the Madness, which documents the work of unlikely citizen activists.

Like, for instance, Connecticut librarians who take on the Patriot Act.

Where Have You Gone, Kurt Vonnegut?

I was happy to read this weekend in the Times Book Review that a collection of previously unpublished writings by Kurt Vonnegut has just come out. I can’t get enough Vonnegut — he’s got an inimitable way of satirizing the absurdity of real life by creating his own absurd world of fiction. He and Orwell are the ones I think of when I listen to the news in the morning and get struck by truth-is-stranger-than-fiction quality of some of the stories. I jotted down a few such stories that I heard on Morning Edition last week, all in the same day:

1. “Adventure capitalists” have secured a 50-year lease of one of Baghdad’s public parks, and plan to construct a Disney-like theme park, replete with a water park wherein cartoon images are displayed in the mist created by the fountains. This is in a city that has less than 6 hours of electricity per day, and where car bombs and random violence have become as commonplace as jaywalkers in New York City. To their credit, the plucky financiers pull no punches about their motives: they readily admit that they only care about building up the community infrastructure to the extent that it makes them richer.

2. Army hospitals are struggling to stop overdoses by injured veterans of the Iraq war. Reportedly, vets are being drugged into a near-comatose state for much of their day, with a cocktail of up to 11 different medications. This is happening in what the Army calls “Warrior Transition Units.” One poor warrior at Fort Knox was left in his room for two days or more — unconscious — and was found dead when someone finally decided to check on him.

3. Endurance specialist David Blaine broke a world record by holding his breath underwater for more than 17 minutes on the Oprah Winfrey Show. “When he broke the record, with a half minute to spare, he said he accomplished a life-long dream.”

4. Many Americans are finding themselves “upside down” in car debt, i.e., their car is worth less than the amount they owe on their auto loan. They have no choice but to continue making the payments, or pay thousands of dollars to just get out from underneath the onerous obligation.

Al's Last Trip

Could we ever know — is it even worth contemplating — what impact the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, who died yesterday at 102, had on human affairs?

On April 16, 1943, in his lab at Sandoz Corp. in Basel, Hoffman absorbed a small amount of LSD-25, a substance he had isolated in 1938 while researching the potential pharmaceutical properties of the ergot fungus. A few days later, he ingested 250 mg of LSD-25. He went home and lay down and, as he described the experience, "sank into a not unpleasant intoxicated-like condition, characterized by an extremely stimulated imagination."

In a dreamlike state, with eyes closed (I found the daylight to be unpleasantly glaring), I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors. After some two hours this condition faded away. This was, altogether, a remarkable experience . . . .

No kidding.

In 1954, Oscar Janiger, an LA psychiatrist, began a series of controlled studies, eventually dosing more than 950 people, from all walks of life, age 18 to 81. Janiger's aim was simply to see how different people reacted to LSD. What he found was that the substance had a profound effect on creativity and spirituality.

Janiger's research was shut down in 1962 by the U.S. government, which eventually led Sandoz to cease production of LSD.  The drug, which was a legal experimental psychiatric treatment until 1966, has been manufactured illegally ever since, although the CIA didn't have any trouble getting its hands on it.

LSD never really went away, and in fact was pretty popular again in the 1990s. That resurgence came to an end with the arrest of two chemists, William Pickard and Clyde Apperson. The Drug Enforcement Agency estimated that the availability of LSD dropped by 95 percent. Pickard was sentenced In November 2003 to life without parole, and Apperson got 30 years with no possibility of early release.

Hoffman was scheduled to speak at the World Psychedelic Forum, in Basel, in March, but poor health kept him away.

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(VT) Yankee Doodle Doldrums

Earlier this month, Christian Parenti, a contributing editor at The Nation, gave a lecture at the University of Vermont. I think the talk was ostensibly about climate change, but who knows? Parenti spent most of the time talking about other stuff, and I couldn't follow his thesis.

In a May 12 Nation cover story  (that magazine is a little preemptive), Parenti offers a much clearer argument — this time, on the nuclear power industry. In short, he says that, despite the best efforts of the Bush administration, nuclear's heyday is up. To illustrate his point, Parenti points out that Warren Buffet's MidAmerican Nuclear Energy Company recently decided not to built a new nuclear plant in Idaho because it wouldn't be profitable, even with federal subsidies.

When I spoke with California-based "peak oil" expert Richard Heinberg on April 18, he had this to say in response to my question about nuclear energy:

SEVEN DAYS: The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant is a hot-button topic. Some oppose nuclear power outright, while others claim it’s cleaner than coal.
RICHARD HEINBERG: Well, nuclear power is inherently limited by the supply of uranium, which is another non-renewable resource. The best study we have on future uranium supply . . . concludes that global uranium supplies will peak, even in the best case scenario, before 2050. So if we continue operating our current fleet of 103 nuclear power stations in this country, we’ll be able to keep them running through most of this century with gradually increasing costs . . . If that’s the case, why not just invest directly in wind and solar now and bypass nuclear?

Interestingly, the most-discussed nuclear plant in Parenti's Nation piece is Vermont Yankee. He writes that Yankee's recent 20-percent power uprate is one of the largest nationwide in the last decade-- not a good sign, notes Parenti, in light of last summer's cooling-tower collapse at the facility.

"One of these days a plant will blow," said Diana Sidebotham, a Putney activist, in Parenti's cover story.

Richardson to Douglas: Find Nick Garza

From an unsourced story by KOB-TV, in Albuquerque: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson's office plans to ask Vermont Gov. Jim Douglas to "step up" the search for Nick Garza, the Middlebury College student missing since Feb. 5. Garza, a freshman, was raised in Albuquerque, and his friends and family there have been closely following the search efforts.

As Seven Days reported last month, Nick's family, who are living on the Middlebury campus, has reached out to Douglas, a Middlebury grad and a resident of the town. Douglas spokesman Jason Gibbs told us then that the governor is ready to help, but has not received any specific requests for assistance from the Middlebury Police Department.

I've put in a call to Gibbs to find out whether Richardson has been in touch with Douglas yet. We''ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, if you're willing and able, the Garza family needs your help Saturday. They have organized a search of areas near the Middlebury campus. Volunteers, who must be at least 18 and in good health, will gather at Middlebury College’s Kenyon Arena, on South Main Street, at 9 a.m. If you're interested, email Nick's family at nickgarza.search@gmail.com.

 The search will be led by the missing persons consultant, Gary Peterson, a former broadcast investigative reporter in Minneapolis.

Down in the Hole in America

The New York Times: "The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world's prison population . . . . Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries."

The Times reports that the U.S. has the highest number of prisoners per 100,000 population — 751 — in the world. That's compared to Japan, 63; Germany, 88 and England, 151. Even Russia and China stick fewer people in jail cells than the United States. And no one imposes longer prison sentences than American judges.

According to the Times' experts, a number of factors help explain the country's "extraordinary incarceration rate: higher levels of violent crime, harsher sentencing laws, a legacy of racial turmoil, a special fervor in combating illegal drugs, the American temperament, and the lack of a social safety net. Even democracy plays a role, as judges — many of whom are elected, another American anomaly — yield to populist demands for tough justice."

The Times story doesn't dig into two related issues: the conditions in American prisons; and who benefits when the answer to every anti-social act is a jail cell.

Seven Days readers are probably familiar with Paul Wright, an ex-con from Brattleboro who has become a fierce advocate for U.S. prisoners. Wright started up Prison Legal News in 1990, and has documented dozens of cases of prisoner abuse and exploitation. In January, PLN reported (subscription required) that Vermont leads the country in the percentage of prisoners who take anti-psychotic medications.

Check out Ken Picard's fascinating March 2007 profile of Wright here.

Wright and PLN just published a new anthology, called Prison Profiteers: Who Profits from Mass Incarceration, that examines the $185 billion taxpayers spend locking people up in America. The book looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, medical corporations and other industries and individuals that benefit from the prison business.  

The Ken Lay Chair in Economics

Sounds like the punchline of a Motley Fool joke, doesn't it? It's not. As an alum and former member of the faculty at the University of Missouri — not to mention someone who documented Enron's crimes and the aftermath back in the day — I have to wonder what the hell MU hopes to accomplish by filling this position. Lay was convicted of fraud and conspiracy for his role in the loss of 4,000 jobs and about $2.1 billion in employee pension investments. He died, in July 2006, before he could be sentenced, so he never paid the full measure for his crimes. At MU, at least, he'll live on in a more favorable light.

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Talking Points TV

The New York Times steps up with a major piece of investigative reporting that does for television what the Judith Miller affair did for, well, the New York Times.

Reporter David Barstow mined 8,000 pages of emails and internal documents to explain how the Bush administration has tried to "shape terrorism coverage from inside the major TV and radio networks."

The piece describes how the military "analysts" you see regularly on cable and network television were "wooed" by the Pentagon with private briefings, government-funded trips to Iraq and even access to classified intelligence in a concerted effort to mislead the American people about the progress of the war. 

In turn, members of this group have echoed administration talking points, sometimes even when they suspected the information was false or inflated. Some analysts acknowledge they suppressed doubts because they feared jeopardizing their access.

A few expressed regret for participating in what they regarded as an effort to dupe the American public with propaganda dressed as independent military analysis.

“It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ” Robert S. Bevelacqua, a retired Green Beret and former Fox News analyst, said.

Gore, The Sequel

A recent post of mine sparked a spirited exchange in comments section. Now that it's petered out, I guess it's OK to mention, for those who don't know it already, that Al Gore has a new slideshow, presenting evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting.

Gore also argues that acting on climate change will require a sense of "generational mission" similar to that of the civil rights movement.

Americans: "Life Sucks Right Now"

The Pew Research Center pulled together a history of a perennial question, and in a new survey found that "fewer Americans now than at any time in the past half century believe they're moving forward in life. . . . This is the most downbeat short-term assessment of personal progress in nearly half a century of polling by the Pew Research Center and the Gallup organization. You can see the full report here. Read it and weep for the good 'ol days.

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Twinfield Students Heart Small Scale Hydro

A group of ninth-graders at Twinfield Union School in Plainfield wants to fight global warming by building a small hydro-electric plant on school grounds. Kids these days.

The "Twinfield Hydro Team" explains their project in an op-ed in today's Times Argus:

We're proposing to divert a small amount of water through an 18-inch pipe before it's returned to the river. Depending on how much water we're able to use, we could generate enough power to cut Twinfield's $60,000 energy bill half or eliminate it entirely. We could reduce our school's carbon footprint, help our school budget and still maintain proper flows in the river to protect fish throughout the year.

Pretty cool, right? But they wrote the op-ed because they're having a hard time getting through the Agency of Natural Resource's permitting process. Bummer.

I stumbled upon this story while I was looking for Vermont videos on YouTube. I found this one, from James O'Hanlon at Moonlight Video. Last summer, middle school student (now high school student) Emyln Crocker spoke with 89-year-old former state legislator Alvin Warner about a small hydro-electric plant on his land in Lowell. Warner built it in the 1970s, as an alternative to the nuclear power generated by Vermont Yankee.

The best part about this video, other than all of the lush green foliage, is Warner's accent. This dude is no hippy.

Best of luck, you wild, rebellious teenagers!

Annals of Journalism

The Smoking Gun: A recent L.A. Times story that re-examined the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur and pinned it on associates of Sean "Diddy" Combs was based on fabricated documents. The Times will launch an internal investigation into the authenticity of documents provided to them by a 31-year-old con man named James Sabatino, 31, whose,  uh, mug is below.

Man, what a breach of the Elements, especially Number 3.

It's 4:20. Do you know where your congressman is?

Via Crooks & Liars, U.S. Rep. Barney Frank wants to legalize "small amounts" of marijuana.

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Nutraloaf: Cruel and Unusual Punishment?

When prisoners in Vermont poop on their plates and throw it at prison guards, the guards fight back by feeding them nutraloaf. But a group of prisoners is suing the state to stop that practice, because nutraloaf is gross.

From the AP on Sunday:

On Monday, the Vermont Supreme Court will hear arguments in a class action suit brought by inmates who say [nutraloaf is] not food but punishment and that anyone subjected to it should get a formal disciplinary process first.

Prison officials see nutraloaf as a tool for behavior modification.

"It's commonplace in other states as a way of providing nutrition in a mechanism that dissuades inmates from throwing feces, urine, trays and silverware," said Vermont Corrections Commissioner Rob Hofmann.

****

Seth Lipschutz, an attorney with Vermont's Prisoner's Rights office, says the state has a legitimate interest in changing the behavior of inmates who misbehave.

But he says a diet of nutraloaf is punishment, plain and simple. To call it anything else is "playing with words to get what they want. It's wrong and it's sad," Lipschutz said.

Ok, I agree that it's weird that the state is using food as punishment, but is nutraloaf really that bad?

Vermont Media on Peter Freyne's Departure

If you saw Seven Days yesterday, you know that longtime political columnist Peter Freyne is retiring the Inside Track. As I said yesterday, we're all sad to see him go.

And so, apparently, is Senator Patrick Leahy. Dan Barlow of the Vermont Press Bureau interviewed Leahy for a lengthy story about Freyne that appeared today in the Times Argus.

U.S. Sen. Patrick Leahy said Wednesday that Freyne's retirement is a "big loss" for Vermont. The columnist has an institutional memory of Vermont politics and was always unafraid to "look behind the façade" or ask probing questions to find out "what is really going on," the Democratic senator said.

"I went to his blog every day," Leahy said. "He is the type of writer who clearly knows hypocrisy. But he also knows the difference between healthy skepticism and cynicism."

Leahy also delivered some friendly barbs at Freyne, joking that he was happy that he was born blind in one eye so that he didn't have to see the columnist in his biker shorts in the summer. Later he joked that Freyne's hair loss during his cancer battle was "because he wanted to look more like me."

"Seriously, Peter was very courageous in how he wrote about his cancer as he was fighting it," Leahy said. "It takes guts to do that."

The Burlington Free Press ran a little story, too, in the Living section. They didn't interview anybody, or link to our website. The item doesn't have a byline.

There is one little hyperlink in their story, though. Look closely — the word "health" is highlighted. The story mentions Freyne's battle with cancer, so I figured that the health link would take me to a blog post or an article about Freyne's health. But no, no. It's an inline text ad for some "Chinese weight loss secret."

This is exactly the kind of media criticism Freyne would write about in his column. I will really, really miss him.

UPDATE: looks like the Free Press has removed that embedded inline ad in the Freyne story.

Burlington Protesters to General Dynamics: Get Out of Town

Just before 7 this morning, a few college-aged students blocked the entrance of a Lakeside Avenue parking lot belonging to General Dynamics Armament and Technical Products. Its parent company, General Dynamics, "is the sixth largest defense contractor in the world," reports Sam Maron, a University of Vermont senior who coordinated the event. Maron showed up today "to make a stand and show that, as Vermonters, we want a peace economy, and not one based on war."

The event lasted about five hours and was attended by some two dozen supporters. Maron says he and others intended to cause "disruption" and "financial damage" to the company's operations. No arrests were made, and aside from a "brief traffic congestion," protesters didn't interrupt any business, according to Burlington Deputy Police Chief Walt Decker.

"Bad assumption, my frigid Norwegian ass!"

Need a little help wrapping your arms around the bad news on Wall Street? The Times tries to put it into English, here. I found this to be much more entertaining, though. (Put cursor in bottom-left corner to see the show.)

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Iraq Prognostication, Five Years Later

In November 2002, The Chronicle of Higher Education asked nine scholars, "What will the world be like five years after a war with Iraq?"

The responses, which you can find here, range from the conventional — "But imagine that these people look to Iraq and see the Iraqi people enjoying the fruits of freedom. From Iraq to Syria and throughout the region, the question will be asked: "Why not me?" — by the chronically wrong Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute, to the eerily prescient — "A military attack by the United States and installation of a new government in Iraq will not have fostered democratization in the Arab world but rather reinforced the perception of many . . . that the United States had moved from its initially stated and focused intention of capturing Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda to a war against Islam and the Muslim world — by John L. Esposito, professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University.

Meanwhile, Slate is marking the fifth anniversary of the start of the war by asking five "liberal hawks" about their original support for the invasion. 

"This is where we are right now."

Barack Obama is making a major speech on race this morning:

"Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.

This is where we are right now."

Bubble? What Bubble?

In a videoconference on Thursday, President Bush listened to reports on Afghanistan from military and civilian personnel and said he was "a little envious" of their service on the front lines.

"It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks," Bush said.

Really, now. What can one say about this level of obtuseness? Nothing you didn't already know, I suppose.

Nazis on Vacation

Couldn't sleep last night, so I caught up on my magazine reading. Came across an article in this week's New Yorker about a newly discovered photo album from Auschwitz. The photos show members of the SS relaxing and joking around — taking a break from sending people to the gas chambers.

I can't find the article online, but there's a short photo slideshow on the New Yorker's website.

I read another story about this album in the New York Times a few months back. They've got a lengthier audio slideshow on their website, featuring an interview with Rebecca Erbelding, an archivist at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.

3:30 a.m. is definitely the time to ponder these incredibly disturbing images. The phrase "banality of evil" doesn't even scratch the surface.

ANR should not censor the news

That's the headline of Seven Days publisher Paula Routly's Letter to the Editor in today's Barre/Montpelier Times Argus.

The letter refers to a kerfuffle involving Mike Ives' cover story of a couple weeks ago, about Vermont's groundwater.

While researching the story, Mike naturally attempted to talk with a hydrologist at ANR. But ANR Communications Director Sabina Haskell shut him down. Haskell wouldn't allow anyone at ANR to talk with Mike — ironic given her past as a journalist and an advocate of open government.

Vermont Press Bureau reporter Dan Barlow covered ANR's conduct in a story last Thursday, the day after our paper hit the streets. Then the Times Argus mentioned the case in a March 2 editorial, and Jim Romenesko linked to the story from his national media blog.

In other words, a government agency refusing to give vital information to Vermont's largest weekly newspaper is a big deal.

Paula writes:

Thanks to Daniel Barlow and the Rutland Herald/Times-Argus for covering the recent dust-up between Seven Days newspaper and the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources. The taxpayers of Vermont should know that their "public servants" have been given the green light to shut out journalists they deem to be "biased" — read: critical of ANR and its methods. Think about it: Should government agencies be free to pick and choose which news outlets are acceptable and which aren't? Should they be allowed to censor a weekly that last year won six awards from the Vermont Press Association, including first place for "General Excellence" among the state's non-daily newspapers?

Um, no.

I guess all the attention paid off — Mike Ives contacted Haskell to schedule some interviews for a follow-up story this week, and she put him right through to someone.